Fwd: Classroom tools

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

Let's keep our feet on the ground here.

Just because teaching is a field where mediocrity (or worse) often goes
unpunished, does not mean that expertise is irrelevant. It is possible for a
bunch of non-teachers on a mailing list to have good ideas, or to discuss
good ideas they've heard elsewhere. But some of the worst disasters in
education come from good ideas that turn into trendy dogma. Success comes
from thoughtful, flexible application and evaluation by experienced teachers
who believe, and then divulgation that respects the ideas and inclinations
of those who do not at first believe.

Most of us on this list are probably similar in our learning styles -
naturally oriented towards understanding and discovery, resistant to
repetition. I remember hating many of the most traditional aspects of
schooling, most particularly the emphasis on formulaic recipes. But when I
became a teacher and tried socratically to get my students to construct
their own recipes, refusing to tell them 'step 1 step 2' for anything, I had
some spectacular failures. One or two students would love it and figure out
what I was trying to teach in 5 minutes - then get even more bored than they
would have been from the formula, as I spent the rest of the period getting
frustrated with students who were frustrated with me because they didn't get
it and I wouldn't just tell them how. It is a hard balance to strike.

I've made constructivism work in the classroom a few times, too, and it is
great. But let me tell you: the less fired up and prepared I am, the more
likely I am to choose something more traditional. Because when things don't
go well, constructivism is much worse.

Luckily, we here do not actually have control of any schools. If we ossify
into dogmatic constructivists, we will just hurt our own project, not
students. If we do not make the tools teachers need, as well as the ones
kids need, nobody will pay any attention to us, and OLPC will just dry up
and blow away. I do not want that.

And there's another constituency besides teachers and students:
researchers/administrators/bureaucrats. It's easy to paint these guys as the
enemy. For instance, in the US, standardized testing companies, with their
seductive call of 'cheap, clean data', have seduced these guys into imposing
the nightmare of No Child Left Behind, where the test is king. But if, as I
said above, there are right ways and wrong ways to teach, who is going to
sort it out if not the researchers? Who is going to help the good mdels
spread faster than the bad ones, if not the administrators? So we need to
focus some attention on having the programs we write help to generate the
research data that they need, if we want to break the grip of standardized
testing.

To bring this all back to earth, here's another teacher-centrically-inspired
idea that I didn't include in the original message: a word processor that
saves the whole undo stack with the file. It's technically possible: it's
not actually so much more data, and text is lightweight. It would integrate
well (from a user perspective; as a programmer, this is no easy job) with
the Journal file paradigm. And it would help teachers focus on teaching
writing process instead of just results, and, by the way, provide a natural
barrier against computer-aided-plagiarism.

--------------------------------
I sent the above message off-list by mistake. Edward Cherlin already
responded to paragraph 2:


From: Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>

...
Of course. I am well aware of the New Math disaster and several others.
That's why *I* am talking about helping teachers discover discovery, and
complaining that Nicholas dismisses teachers as irrelevant. I also know that
we have to ask teachers and children what will work in their schools under
the conditions they have to deal with.
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